post #6

A man toppled from the eighth story balcony bringing a tree limb down with his body which lay for an hour or maybe two as a crowd trickled in, eventually filling all the block’s surrounding sidewalks. We waited to see how the paramedics would lift him – as a dead man, or as a paralyzed man. We speculated, one stranger to another. Some said he was dead. Others said he jumped. Later that night I walked up to the dead tree limb, said the first line of Kaddish, and blew a kiss to the ground.